“From late May to early June 1873, at a depth of 8.5 meters from the surface,” the show’s meticulous catalog recounts, “… Schliemann discovered a unique complex, encompassing 8,880 objects.” (Yes, Schliemann counted individual beads as objects, but the majority of the gold ones were uniquely manufactured by hand, rather than east uniformly from molds.) An archeological pioneer, Schliemann was not above fibbing about his finds, which he liked to call “Priam’s Treasure,” after the Iliad’s Trojan king. In his account of the excavation he told how he called a quick coffee break to divert light-fingered workers, cut an object out of the ground and gave it to his Greek wife, Sophia, who whisked it safely away in her shawl. The truth is that Sophia was home in Athens that day. Schliemann told other probable whoppers: for instance, that he foresaw as a child he’d one day excavate Troy.
In the recent biography “Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit,” David Traill offers considerable, ff not conclusive evidence that Sehliemann salted the site with goodies found scattered in the general vicinity. Suspiciously, the gold jewelry doesn’t appear in Schliemann’s first report. “Schliemann,” says Traill, “wanted the treasure to be found in Priam’s palace.” Although genuinely Trojan, the gold actually dates from around 2200 B.C., about 1,000 years before Homer’s characters. (The dig produced artifacts from that period, too, but mostly pots.) Schliemann made other mistakes, most notably digging massive trenches right to bedrock that destroyed much of what he was looking for. Still, most archeologists today agree that despite such shenanigans Hissarlik isn’t just “Schliemannopolis.” It’s Troy.
Schliemann sneaked his Trojan booty to Athens and subsequently tried to sell it. With title and authenticity cloudy, however, Europe’s major museums turned him down. Schliemann wanted fame more than money, so in 1881 he gave it free to the German people. His reputation soared. His funeral in 1890 was attended by European dignitaries including the king of Greece.
Born the son of a German pastor in 1822, the young Schliemann set himself up as a merchant in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1850, he journeyed all the way to California, to settle his emigrated brother’s estate. While there, he engaged in what the Pushkin catalog delicately terms “successful bank operations.” Traill suggests that short-weighing gold dust might be more accurate. Shady trading in indigo and saltpeter during the Crimean War made Sehliemann one of the richest men in Europe, ready for a second life as “a lover of antiquity.”
On a tour of Asia Minor in 1868, Schliemann paid a visit to Frank Calvert, a British consul in Turkey. Calvert convinced Sehliemann that the hill there, part of which he owned, covered the ruins of Troy. Although Calvert and Sehliemann weren’t the first antiquarians to focus on Hissarlik, they were the first with enough money, spare time and passion to do something about it.
Fast forward to 1941: Hitler orders all museum collections be put in storage to protect them from Allied bombs. The “gold of Troy” ends up in huge antiaircraft bunkers near the Berlin Zoo. In 1945, Tolstikov says, the German museum director himself “voluntarily gave [the objects] to the Soviet occupational power so that they…would not be stolen or mined.” Convenient, since Soviet troops were under orders to gather German museum collections and send them back to Russia. (Paintings and sculptures were put on special trains; Schliemann’s gold was flown to Moscow.) For 50 years only select experts and party officials were allowed to look upon Sehliemann’s gold. Tolstikov, who came to the Pushkin in 1978, wasn’t told about the treasures until 1976, and didn’t see them until 1992. During the Soviet era, Tolstikov says, party bosses told museum directors, “Your business is to keep them and not to discuss it-be silent and wait.” For a while, Russia and Germany were seriously discussing the reciprocal return of art treasures displaced during World War II. The talks broke down when the Russian stance hardened into what a German negotiator says was “’no’ on principle.” But the current shift of power in the Duma back toward the communists means, says, the German, that the Russians might at least be willing to play “hard poker.” The gold is, however, off the table. “It will not go anywhere until the last legal problem is solved,” says Tolstikov. “And these legal problems,” he adds with a twist worthy of “Catch-22,” “are so complicated that they can’t be solved.” So you’ll have to make your own odyssey to Moscow, stand in line at the Pushkin and behold the golden evidence of ancient Troy, German numbers and all.
